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Democratic Senators Should Read the Polls
By: Jeffrey H. Anderson, Ph.D
11.20.2009
As late as June 11, by margin of two-to-one and a gap of 31 percent (62 percent to 31 percent), Americans approved of the job that President Obama was doing, according to a Fox News poll released that day. Now, a new Fox News poll released just yesterday shows that this 2:1, 31-percent margin has dropped all the way into a dead heat (46 percent to 46 percent). And among independents, that gap has moved from +40 (66 percent to 26 percent) to -17 (34 percent to 51 percent). People can dismiss this as Fox News if they want, but it was Fox News in June too. And what has President Obama been doing since then? Health care, health care, bowing to foreign leaders, and more health care.
Why would people be so opposed to the president's $1.8 trillion tax-increasing, deficit-increasing, Medicare-siphoning attempt to remake a sixth of the U.S. economy and insert the federal government into the health-care decisions of every American? Other polls suggest an answer.
According to a Rasmussen poll released earlier this year, more than two-third of Americans (68 percent) have health insurance that they rate as good or excellent. According to a Washington Post/ABC News poll released just three days ago, by a margin of almost two-to-one (37 percent to 19 percent), Americans expect that their quality of health care would get worse, rather than better, under Obamacare — and, by a margin of 52 to 11 percent, they expect their health-care costs to increase, rather than decrease. If two-thirds of Americans are happy with their health care, and the vast majority think it would get worse and more expensive under Obamacare (along with knowing that their taxes and the national debt would also rise), that's a ticket to . . . well, to having a 31-point margin in approval rating vanish in less than six months.
And the WaPo/ABC poll was taken before Senator Reid's bill was released, with its government-run "public option." Prior to the Reid bill, the Senate had wisely steered clear of the "public option" over the past several months. Now that Americans again have to worry about having their employer choose the option of dumping them into the government-run plan to save money, the percentage who are optimistic about their quality of care under Obamacare will likely fall even further.
The American people clearly don't want this bill. The only real question at this point is whether swing-state Democratic senators are on a suicide mission, or whether sanity will prevail in the northern wing of the Capitol. 11/20 04:29 PM
This blog post originally appeared on National Review's Critical Condition.
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